Chris Upton: Flying in the face of common sense
Oct 9 2008 By Chris Upton
A while ago now, and possibly never at all, a chap called Icarus borrowed a pair of wings off his father and flew up into the sky.
The Greek legend tells how Icarus flew too close to the sun, the wax which held the feathers together melted, and Icarus crashed back to earth. It was a wise and perceptive story about the limits of human aspiration, and of knowing one’s limits.
In Peter Brueghel’s famous painting of the scene in the Musee des Beaux Arts in Brussels, Icarus splashes clumsily into the sea in the middle distance, and no one else in the painting notices. They have other things to worry about.
They knew about suffering, did the old masters. They knew about man’s enduring aspiration to fly as well. Despite what happens to Icarus, there has always been someone willing to entrust his life to the thin air. And for every Yves Rossy (the chap who jetted across the Channel last week) there is a Steve Fossett.
Robert Cadman is one of the more famous local examples. He attempted to fly from the spire of St Mary’s church in Shrewsbury in February 1739, the intention being to land on the far side of the River Severn, a distance approaching 300 yards.
To say “fly” is something of an exaggeration, for Cadman used a rope. But rope can be just as unreliable as air. The rope broke and Robert Cadman fell to earth just as Icarus did.
Cadman was far from the first person to risk his life in this way. We can go back to Leonardo da Vinci, for example, who designed a kind of glider based on his observation of birds, but he was not silly enough to put his theory of aerodynamics to the test.
The earliest case of manned flight in England, and probably Europe, is recorded by the medieval historian, William of Malmesbury. Medieval chroniclers are not renowned for their accuracy and William was not contemporary with the event, which most have taken place around the year 1000 AD. But the deed was supposed to have taken place in his home town, which gives it a certain credence.
The foolish individual in this case is called Elmer, who was a monk at Malmesbury Abbey, just on the edge of the Cotswolds in Wiltshire. According to William, Elmer the monk took only partial notice of the story of Icarus. He designed two sets of wings, one for his arms and one for his legs, and took himself to the top of the abbey tower.
Launching himself off and collecting the air, ‘he flew for more than the distance of a furlong (200 yards or so).’ The distance specified here implies that the flight was not immediately downwards.
So far, so good. ‘But agitated by the violence of the wind and a current of air, as well as by the consciousness of his rash attempt, he fell and broke both his legs.’ The scene resembles one of those animated cartoons, when Tom or Sylvester chase a mouse off a cliff and only plummet to earth when they realise where they are.
As for Elmer, unlike Icarus, he lived to tell the tale, but was crippled for the rest of his life. The reason for his failure, however, he put down, not to his rashness, but his failure to provide himself with a tail.
It’s this last comment which gives Elmer some degree of credibility. A tail would undoubtedly have helped him control his flying machine, and glide to the ground instead of tumbling to it. Sadly Europe’s very first aviator was not in a position to repeat his experiment.
* Dr Chris Upton is on the roof of Newman University College in Birmingham.
